In May the Navy’s X-47B unmanned aircraft made a successful catapult takeoff from the USS George H. W. Bush (CVN-77). The aircraft had previously made an arrested landing ashore at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland, and its next hurdle will be making a full arrested landing on board a carrier. Assuming the carrier landing is successful, the X-47B will be a candidate for the role of carrier-based unmanned attack and reconnaissance.
Although not as fast as an F/A-18 or the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, it too is designed to penetrate sophisticated enemy air defenses using its stealthy characteristics. The existing Predator drone is much slower and is anything but stealthy; it must operate in a permissive environment to survive. Unlike the Predators that launch Hellfire missiles at terrorists, the X-47B can carry two heavy bombs internally. If it sacrifices stealth, it can carry more weapons externally. This is the same bomb load planned for the F-35. Range is comparable, and the X-47B is designed to be refueled in flight (this characteristic will be tested using surrogate aircraft).
The existence of the X-47B raises an interesting question. It can, apparently, operate from a carrier and carry out missions comparable to those performed by many manned carrier-based aircraft. To what extent can it (or should it) replace manned aircraft? To what extent can it change the economics of carrier aviation? Just what does carrier aviation provide that makes it worth its cost? All of these questions are either being asked or are likely to be asked as the defense budget is cut and carrier opponents point to more and more impressive anti-carrier weapons, such as the highly-publicized (if probably not terribly effective) Chinese DF-21D antiship ballistic missile.
What makes a carrier so special in the strike role is that it is the most efficient way of delivering tons of ordnance on target because its aircraft can return again and again to pick up more weapons. Since a carrier can operate relatively close to an area of ground combat, its aircraft can provide sustained support in a way that aircraft based farther away cannot. That was evident, for example, during the Libyan revolution. Land-based aircraft can fly remarkable distances, but that takes time. If you are a ground commander faced with an immediate threat, you would much prefer not to wait three or six or ten hours for help to appear out of the sky.
It would be different if all ground targets were known in advance and if there were no time issues, but targets can pop up suddenly and are important just when they appear, not for hours afterward. That is apart from the issue of pilot fatigue; pilots who have flown for hours cannot be as alert as those who have taken off closer to the combat area. They can make fatal mistakes. In addition, pilots in cockpits do not have easy access to the mass of information on which attack planning is based. They may not, for example, find it easy to distinguish no-fire areas (this has resulted in friendly-fire attacks in the past). Clearly, all the advantages enjoyed by carrier aircraft are also enjoyed by land-based aircraft operating from bases very close to the battle area, but generally it is difficult to convince other governments to provide those bases. We have neither the bases nor the number of aircraft to cover all potential crises all the time. These factors make it essential for the United States to continue to operate carriers anywhere of vital interest to us. The better question is what sort of aircraft the carriers should operate.
Are Humans Needed?
This question is linked to another: exactly what does a carrier attack pilot do? He strikes two kinds of targets: fixed targets that have been selected on the basis of intelligence, and pop-up targets called out by those fighting on the ground. At one time it was obvious that a human on board an airplane was needed to deal with each, because there was no way to navigate an airplane automatically into position to make a precision attack. Now that we use GPS-guided precision weapons, the situation is a lot less clear.
One might even argue that it is better for a human with access to all available information to select a target and to lay out the route to it. On the battlefield, targets are typically designated in terms of their GPS coordinates. Obviously a human pilot might have a better chance of evading enemy defenses on the way to the target, but losses of unmanned aircraft due to poor routing and much poorer reactions might well be acceptable. It may be that the one place a human pilot is indispensable is the fighter mission conducted under ambiguous circumstances, in which errors not only cost lives but also can have much larger consequences. No one would want to bet that the link between fighter and controller would function all the time, when any failure could be catastrophic, but that would not apply to most of the fighter-attack aircraft on board a carrier.
Pilots are expensive. The F-35 was conceived as a low-cost attack bomber, but during development a great deal was added to make it more survivable and to provide its pilot with much greater capability. That explains both the technological miracle by which the pilot can look down and, using cameras, in effect, see through the bottom of the airplane and the electronic system that provides situational awareness by identifying emitters the airplane detects. The low-cost elements remain, in the form of limited performance and limited stealth, but the parts added to make the pilot effective have run up the cost to the point that the F-35 is by far the most expensive aircraft program in history. It would seem unwise to imagine that it is too big to fail in a time when the defense budget is under intense pressure. Perhaps ominously, it is often described as the last manned combat aircraft. That sort of description invites cancellation in favor of a less expensive unmanned successor.
Pilots also impose indirect costs. They have to fly frequently to maintain proficiency. Carrier landing is often said to be the single most demanding kind of piloting, so naval aviators have to fly frequently, whether or not they are deployed. A carrier must fly its aircraft whether or not they are in combat. If the unmanned aircraft is remotely piloted, its pilot must maintain the same sort of proficiency, so the economics of flying are much the same as with manned aircraft. However, modern unmanned aircraft such as the X-47B are conceived to fly themselves most of the time. Their human operators specify way-points they are to fly through, and they assign targets on the basis of available intelligence.
‘Reusable Missile’
Looked at in this way, an unmanned attack aircraft like the X-47B resembles a carrier-based version of the current Tomahawk missile. If that is a reasonable analogy, then the X-47B is essentially a stealthy reusable missile, and it should fly only when needed for combat. It takes many fewer such missiles to deliver the same punch as manned attack bombers. Instead of being a special-purpose airplane to fly in small numbers alongside the current carrier air wing, the unmanned bomber might well become the majority constituent of the wing. In that case the savings associated with such aircraft might dramatically change the economics of the carrier force.
Refueling might also offer interesting possibilities. An unmanned aircraft that can be refueled in flight ought to be able to remain in the air for many hours, as long as its systems continue to function. A group of such aircraft might be maintained relatively close to an enemy target area and would be difficult for an adversary to attack, yet would offer many of the same advantages as a nearby carrier (aircraft would return periodically to the carrier to reload their weapons). This type of operation would give the carrier useful standoff for better survivability while retaining quick reaction time.
Overall, it would seem wise to distinguish (if possible) the virtues of strike air power from the virtues of pilots on board the strike aircraft. We increasingly use unmanned systems to find our targets; the key technology is GPS, because it allows an evaluator on the ground to make sense of what the various reconnaissance systems see. We clearly sacrifice some human initiative in the process; a pilot in a U-2 can decide to focus his sensors on a possible target in a way that the operator of a big UAV often cannot. The great question for the next few years will be how much we sacrifice, and whether we are willing to pay the price to keep our reconnaissance systems manned. If nearly all targets are designated by operators on the ground surrounded by intelligence data, how much do the pilots who attack the designated systems add?
The X-47B may be at the leading edge of a revolution in military affairs. Usually radical change has been accepted either because existing technology failed or was no longer affordable. Much of the new interwar technology, such as massed tank forces and strategic bombers, was attractive as a way to break the horrifying stalemate experienced during World War I. The United States adopted new concepts after World War II, such as strategic nuclear deterrence, because the alternatives were less and less affordable. Perhaps we will have to adopt unmanned combat aircraft for much the same reason—if we can be sure that they function as advertised.